You have a choice to design a good recruitment and on boarding process

You always have a choice. Leave it to fall apart. Leave people to follow the path of least resistance. Don’t try to improve anything. You could do this, but don’t be surprised when people aren’t complimentary about your hiring and joining process. Don’t be surprised if they leave your company after just a few weeks or months, or they don’t accept the job, or on Day 1 they wonder why they joined.

Sadly, this way is still common.

Or! You get to make it awesome for someone to join your company. To make it a fun process to be part of. Exciting. Enjoyable.

You get to influence how the process works. You might even have people saying “wow” when they join your company. And if you get that, you get engagement for free (you just then need to do maintain it with great management). This is a positive, fun, interesting and enjoyable job.

You get to decide to make it better. Maybe not you, but someone does. And if no-one is deciding to fix and improve the way you recruit or join people to the business – take charge, own it, ask for permission or just do it. Don’t let your job description stop you from making things better. Of course, in some companies asking for better might get you fired (use your judgement – and leave any company like that).

If you’re a hiring manager and you’re working in a broken process – you’re part of the problem. You have the right to try and fix it. You are obliged to make it better. Why wouldn’t you?

It might be hard. You might upset people. Then again, you might not. Everyone else in HR and hiring and management might sigh a collective sigh of relief. Someone else owns it. Yay. We can all help now.

Then again, they may try to control, own and keep possession of parts that are theirs.

You’ll never know until you try.

I like to believe people want to make the work better. I believe people want more. That they want to improve the process. That they want to make it great for candidates and new starters – they often just don’t know how, or aren’t sure whether they are allowed to.

You have a choice

During the hiring and onboarding process there are plenty of touch points between the candidate and your company (or representatives of your company such as agencies, internal HR etc.). At each of these moments there is an opportunity for WOW, MEH or WTF?

You have a choice to design a process that rocks and creates WOW, or one that does not.

It’s not beyond any company’s abilities to create an amazing process, but it does require investment, time, creativity and a willingness to address what’s not working.

Competition is fierce and good people won’t hang around, so it’s essential to make the hiring process a fun, flowing, communicative and rapid process. Other companies have done it, so can you.

In this book, we’ll look at the design of the hiring and onboarding process from the perspective of the candidate and new employee. By putting yourself in their shoes, you should be able to observe, study and describe the process using the following three descriptions of the experience.

WTF?

The process is wild, sporadic, inconsistent and frankly unpleasant for any candidate or new starter.

This is about barely doing the minimum, usually to cover legal requirements – not even industry standard. Dull. Boring. Ineffective.

WTF means What The F… “flip” of course.

MEH.

A bit “me too”. Doing some obvious stuff and a few extras like “SWAG bags” and new starter hugs or whatever else is trending in our PR focused tech recruitment world.

Ironically, these kinds of activity get lots of attention on social media but they rarely genuinely add WOW past the first day impression. Behind some of the PR is still an overall poor experience. This is why studying the entire process is essential to add WOW at all points.

MEH is an expression of a lack of interest or enthusiasm.

WOW.

WOW is when unsuccessful candidates tell everyone how awesome the company is, even when they didn’t get the job.

WOW is when new starters are productive, engaged and enabled in their first week.

WOW is when new starters know they absolutely made the right decision to join you.